Voters cast their ballots at the Sun City Aliante Community Center in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

(Newser)
–
Hundreds of thousands of voters who used Google to find their assigned polling places may have been sent to the wrong spot. Aristotle, a political technology firm that makes a polling place finder of its own, calculates that one of Google's Election Center apps may have given the wrong information to some 700,000 voters in 12 battleground states, Politico reports. The error rate ranged from 0.001% for Iowa to 18% for Washington state.

"Google is a great company; they do things well. This is not one of them," said Aristotle's CEO. "if you’re being sent to the wrong polling place, it’s a pretty big deal, especially if it’s toward the end of the day, and especially if it’s an election that’s closely contested like 2010. Google officials said yesterday that they were working to fix the service.

Once again, this comes down to personal responsibility. You can easily find out where to vote by looking at your government's website. Sure, google maps rocks and is a great tool and is accurate 95% of the time, but they, themselves will tell you it's not always to-date accurate. Neither is MapQuest, a Garvin or TomTom Device. They're tools to be used with common sense.

Fondue

Nov 3, 2010 7:14 AM CDT

Are people really that lazy that they can't just go to the proper website for polling locations? Or is Google making us that lazy? Personally, it sounds as though a private sector, for-profit business should never have been allowed to guide voters to polling stations. Linking voters to the proper website would have been the best service.